NBN Co to release updated rollout stats

news NBN Co has confirmed it will shortly release updated statistics relating to how many premises its predominantly fibre network was deployed to over the last quarter of 2012, in what is expected to be an extremely closely watched announcement which will do much to qualify the network’s progress ahead of the upcoming Federal Election.

Up until the latter quarter of last year, NBN Co was believed to have been making relatively slow progress on deploying its network, as it had primarily been in the planning stage of the deployment. However, subsequent to that period, the company was believed to have entered what it described as its rapid ramp-up phase, where it planned to have some 758,000 premises completed or commenced by the end of 2012.

NBN Co’s progress to the end of September (see table below) appeared to show the company had not at that point started rapidly accelerating its network deployment, with the company at that stage only having passed slightly over 50,000 premises since it started deploying its network, and 179,790 satellite and fixed wireless premises. The company did not break up its satellite and wireless technologies into different figures, despite the fact that the technologies are completely unrelated in terms of NBN Co’s rollout.

In the quarter to 30 September this year, NBN Co only completely deployed fibre to a further 13,000 premises past where the network had previously been established — in the quarter to 30 June this year it had already reached 39,000. It had deployed 18,000 premises by 30 June 2011, the year previously.

NBN Co’s September statistics with respect to the number of premises it has active services at (where customers are actually using its network) similarly showed the company is making slow progress. At 30 September this year the company had just 6,358 fibre customers, and some 17,648 satellite and fixed wireless customers (again, here the company did not break up its satellite and wireless numbers). The company added only a few thousand active fibre services in the three months to 30 September.

In mid-December, NBN Co declined to provide updated statistics at that point relating to its network rollout, stating that it would only release updated details on its rollout every calendar year. However, this morning a spokesperson for the company confirmed it would in the next several weeks release a quarterly update on the company’s progress – including information on whether it had reached its goal of having 758,000 fibre premises commenced or completed by the end of 2012.

The news of the imminent statistics release comes as the company has recently significantly delayed responding to a Freedom of Information request for similar statistics. In mid-December, Delimiter filed a Freedom of Information request with NBN Co seeking updated statistics on the company’s rollout as at Friday 7 December. Normally, government entities such as NBN Co are required to respond to such FoI requests within several weeks.

However, since that time NBN Co has sought an extension of time to respond to the FoI request, stating that its office was shut down over the Christmas holiday period and that this and other factors meant that it would be unable to respond to the FoI request in the normal timeframe (which would have made the FoI request due on 10 January 2013).

“… the information requested falls outside of NBN Co’s normal reporting processes,” one of the company’s FoI officers wrote in an email to Delimiter seeking an extension to respond to the FoI request. “In that context, NBN Co staff are required to collect, review and – in particular – verify the above figures, which is a complex task.”

In further email communication, the FoI officer noted that to meet the FoI request, “NBN Co staff will need to collate and reconcile data from across various NBN Co databases”. They added: “This will take place over, roughly, the next month and it will take some time and planning, particularly for the formal reconciliation.”

The extent to which NBN Co has rolled out its network by the time of the next Federal Election is expected to be a critical factor determining the overall future of the project. Opposition Leader Tony Abbott has repeatedly indicated that he does not see value in the project and may halt or cancel it. Shadow Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull has taken a more moderate approach to the project; however, Turnbull currently prefers a more limited fibre to the node rollout, compared to the fibre to the home deployment under the current NBN model. It is unclear to what extent the Coalition will continue with the current FTTH NBN deployment, should it take power at the next election.

opinion/analysis
I want to make several points here with respect to NBN Co’s transparency around the release of its rollout statistics.

Firstly, it is clear that the company’s internal reporting mechanisms are not well set up to provide information on an ongoing basis with respect to its network rollout. Sure, the Christmas holiday period fouls things up somewhat, but I think it’s important to highlight the fact here that the company is currently stating that it will take close to two months to provide basic information about its rollout.

Personally, I find it fairly staggering that NBN Co needs an amount of time measured in months to provide updated rollout statistics. As a number of other readers have pointed out, surely its operational and business support systems do contain live statistics on how many end user premises are actively connecting to its network (the ‘databases’ which the company’s FoI officer mentioned). It should not take months to query these systems for updated stats.

Updated stats on how many premises the company’s network has physically passed will be a little harder to obtain, but I am 100 percent sure that senior NBN Co executives such as CEO Mike Quigley receive at least weekly updates estimating how the company’s network construction rollout is progressing, compiled from information provided by the various contractors and internal sources. It should not be a stretch for the company to formalise this information every month and provide it publicly … the delivery of such reports internally represents normal behaviour for any major corporation.

Secondly, I want to note that it seems clear at the moment that NBN Co is quite conscious of the need to present its rollout information in a format favourable to itself.

When the company released its rollout statistics this time 12 months ago, it did so on the 3rd of January, without fanfare, in a humble media release. This year, with an election looming and the company’s current stats looking quite anaemic in the face of continual pressure from the Opposition and hostile elements of the media, the stakes are higher, and NBN Co is currently no doubt considering its battle plan. The debate around its statistics release in several weeks – no matter what the stats themselves actually show – will be massive, and NBN Co knows this. Right now, it is no doubt girding itself for that media war.

And who can blame it for doing so? I note that the elements of the media which have made a habit of sharply criticising NBN Co at every available opportunity have continued that habit over the Christmas break. It’s a new year, it’s 2013, but nothing has changed — let the spin (and it comes from all sides simultaneously) begin.

48 COMMENTS

but I am 100 percent sure that senior NBN Co executives such as CEO Mike Quigley receive at least weekly updates estimating how the company’s network construction rollout is progressing

I’d not be so sure about that. We don’t have any evidence to prove that. Nor disprove it. We know Quigley certainly gets “active connection” stats regularly, as does Conroy. But seeing as they have only been releasing the total passed about every 3 months, they may not get them. TBH, I wouldn’t be surprised if they weren’t- I’d highly doubt David Thodey gets “total customer numbers” every few weeks. It wouldn’t actually serve any purpose. Any marketing or pricing changes would take many weeks, if not months, to show a difference. I don’t get this idea that receiving monthly updates increases the importance of the information?

However, I have examined the information NBN Co is providing in this area, and I would point out that it only contains ‘forward-looking’ data

Actually Renai, you can see how many have been completed by watching them month-to-month and looking at the ones that drop off the list. They drop off when they are completed.

As a number of other readers have pointed out, surely its operational and business support systems do contain live statistics on how many end user premises are actively connecting to its network

ACTIVE users, yes and we’ve seen this number reported weeks at a time. That’s easy- provisioning for services must be done real-time. But total passed? It wouldn’t surprise me at all if the numbers weren’t accurate until the last few weeks of a reporting period- ie the Quarter. I still don’t see the problem with this? Would they have an idea every month? Probably, but as they’ve said and as I said myself last year during your FOI request article, consolidation and reconciliation of those numbers takes WEEKS. And they would NOT, under any circumstance, want to give out inaccurate results, or open themselves for even MORE questioning.

Finally, I’m not really surprised they don’t WANT to release the information beyond quarterly- all it serves is to give Turnbull another number to grab onto and say how slow they’re going. Even if the number DID match their predictions, it wouldn’t matter. Turnbull hasn’t even admitted the 2nd Corporate Plan is relevant yet, so why would he agree they’re on track?? I don’t blame them for not reporting every month- it only serves to give the LNP fodder even IF the numbers are on track.

Sounds like a pretty complex job to put that together. Surely it would be easier to organically generate it from NBN Co’s systems to start with?

Tallweirdo over on WP does it every month. It’s not too hard actually.

But the interesting point here, is these are fully completed FSAMs. What about all the dozen or more partiallycompleted ones, which add thousands if not tens of thousands of premises to the count? What the monthly ready-for-service plan gives is an indication of the totally done FSAMs. But the partially completed ones aren’t included in it (they’re still listed). So any attempt by NBNCo. to release information about premises passed NOT including FSAMs not wholly completed would be very inaccurate. That was the point I was trying to make :)

As someone who has had to prepare Govt reports I can say with plenty of experience that its not as easy as people think. You cant just push a button and expect the magic answer to pop out (well, you can sometimes), not matter how much you want it to. There is preparation of data, confirmation of data, and other superfluous steps prettying up the data.

Manipulating the data into the final form takes time, and while the time and effort is acceptable for a quarterly report, putting the same effort in to monthly reports isnt as beneficial.

I worked with reports that took a couple of hours (pretty much just data manipulation) all the way to reports that took a week to make (manual reports, needing manual work – yuck). It simply isnt time or cost effective to take so long to do a report that will be redundant in another 4 weeks, but thats what Renai seems to expect.

Even if rough data were able to be provided, that still wouldnt be good enough for some sectors. And in the end all it would do would be to dilute the real information for little to no gain, and at a much greater cost.

FYI, ended up building a nifty little database for the longer one. Got the time down to under a day for them. They seemed happy.

NBN Co’s operational systems should have a very easy way to pull out the number of active connections on its network, at the very least. In 2013, some things do indeed have a magic button. That’s way IT systems work …

1- I never said Active can’t be reported- they regularly report that number. Conroy certainly does and it gets updated every few weeks in the media

2- “Passed” is NOT the same as “Ready for Service” And that was the point I was making- they will KNOW how many are “Ready for Service” as they will need to to provision RSP services, but as I explained to Renai, there would be many tens of thousands in UNcompleted FSAMs (ie, NOT Ready for Service, but started) that have been passed as well. Hence, “Passed” isn’t actually “Passed” it is “FSAMs operational” And hence why they won’t report “Passed” every month, because it DOESN’T take into account uncompleted FSAMs which means they are are tens of thousands of premises off in calculations.

Seven tech knows his shit, I work in GIS for a very large power company and basically everything he said is true.

Not to mention, if you think it is a lot of trouble to compare a couple of lists (which takes all of 10 minutes in Excel, or 2 if you know what you are doing) then how on earth can you claim that it is easy to pull this data and know that it is accurate.

Some dick might have accidentally created a crapload of connections/records, you have to go over the data you pull with a fine tooth comb, because people make stupid mistakes all the time and what if you report how you passed so many services and then you find out what dickhead #1 (every workplace has them) did that week while you were away.

Then next time you do a report it hasn’t moved, or has possibly gone backwards, imagine the field day that the media would have with that, so in short, you are trying to create a problem and more work for the people doing the background data work (probably for the few competent ones who have more important shit to do than spend 20% of their work time running reports and checking the data).

The idea the NBNCo doesn’t have information on premises passed is laughable. They’re paying several companies to roll out the network. Does anyone really believe they don’t know how those companies are progressing against the plans. On what grounds are they being paid??

The NBNCo’s job is to roll out the network. Either they know what they’re doing and where they are up to or they are incompetent. Personally, I don’t think Mike Quigley is incompetent.

Sorry CMOT, but that is a completely unfounded point. Do you know what the contracts stipulate in terms of payment? Every week? Month? Quarter? Up front and then the balance at completion? After X number of premises and then after every 1000 thereafter?

No. So trying to use that as a reason to say they have the information is completely unfounded.

Quarterly is utterly standard and I see no reason why they would be different otherwise. Would they (the contractors) be reporting internally in that time during the quarter? Of course. But they have to reconcile their own numbers before giving therm to NBNCo, before NBNCo. can do the same. Installers are admin staff. There would be ALOT of translation needed between the front line and people who actually report it.

There is no reason whatsoever in your point that they would have to have that information as a whole more than a few weeks before the quarter.

And yes, I did have a great holidays. I sat on the beach for many days on end, worked out, watched great TV and caught Skyfall and the Hobbit, read most of the James Bond novels and re-read most of the Wheel of TIme, and consumed a great many tequila sunrises.

It is disappointing to see that even basic statistics like these are hard to come by. I don’t want to be partisan but for a major corporation to not be able to produce this information (or even not bother reporting it without a FOI request) seems very unusual. NBNCO is a government corporation and can’t even hide behind the standard commercial sensitivity argument most business would hide behind.

The breakdown between wireless and satellite would also be interesting because the satellite connections are almost certainly loss making and the fixed wireless network doesn’t seem to be as far deployed as originally intended.

Hi Renai, welcome back to the galleon where you will be expected to slave even harder than last year :-)

I understand wanting to know figures that show whether or not the NBN is on track to fulfill its corporate plan and to identify the FUD that is regularly thrown about with gay abandon by all and sundry.

I am sure that you understand that from your own business Renai, the simple fact is that the collection, collation and distribution of progress, budget and financial reports cost any business time and money. These reports need to be produced to firstly satisfy legal requirements and secondly to assist in making business decisions. Generally businesses will tend to produce the least amount of reports they can. Usually at the company level, this will be board meeting reports on a monthly basis.

The NBN is producing and publishing figures on their progress each month as has been pointed out by Seven_Tech. They may be raw and not give all the answers but it seems possible to get the answers to most questions by processing the figures ourselves or keeping an eye on Whirlpool.

Now if the NBN was being built by BHP do you think that we would be able to get the same progress reports we do with NBN Co.? I doubt that we would. As to getting a report which was outside the normal sequence cycle you would have no hope even if you were the chairman of the board unless you were backed by a formal board request..

Because of what I have said above, my opinion is that if anyone believes that the reporting procedure of NBN Co. needs to change than the people they need to be approaching is the shareholders who are the only ones with the power to have NBN Co. report in a different way.

The interesting statistic to see will be uptake in those areas that the copper network is being turned off, as this will help determine the real demand and hopefully shut up the “wireless is all anyone needs crowd”. Do you know if that is happening in any site this year.

On the plus got our fist NBNco work commencement letter at my office prior a month or so a go and have been notice fiber works happening in the area. My home also got added to the roll out list about being a couple of blocks off the last one.

From my own experience of large corporations, at the executive level, monthly reports consist of smiley faces to reflect whether the stats match the goals or not.
The actual raw data never goes anywhere near the execs.

How often do we see the CEO of a company being an accountant with no technical understanding what-so-ever?

So they claim nearly 180 000 premises covered by wireless and satellite..

Given the interim satellite was only for 30 000 premises that leaves 150 000 premises for wireless…

the max number of premises per tower is 360 that gives us 416 operational towers working at 30th September… But reality is it would have to be more as most towers are running much fewer premises per tower…

I am calling shenanigans on the figures as I am having serious difficulty seeing 416 blue operational wireless areas on the official NBN map.

The interim satellite service, interim as it is, is designed to deal with 30,000 connections. That doesn’t mean its actual total coverage is 30,000; they’ve taken account of the expected takeup, which being satellite and only for the next 2-3 years is expected to be fairly low.

The actual footprint is far greater than 30,000 and this would have to be what they’re using, because it’s premises “passed”, not connected, and the fixed-wireless component is growing quite slowly. I’d estimate the satellite portion of the listed coverage to be at least 120,000-130,000 premises; it would represent the entire portion covered by the satellite component, i.e. every single premise not planned for fibre or fixed-wireless.

It is clever use of the numbers but what else can they really use for “premises passed”? That doesn’t require an actual active service, and since satellite has literally 100% coverage and is live now, that means everywhere not planned for the other services is already “passed”.

I don’t see why if you got a letter saying NBN is on in your neighbourhood you’d say oh that’s nice, but I’m currently happy with the service i get on copper? Seriously I can’t wait to make the switch; but then there are people out there with analogue TV’s :)

In regards to the reporting, I work for a Large Government Agency, and the systems we have are very difficult to provide meaningful statistics from, it’s rather frustrating but there seems to be a complete lack of reporting built into business systems when they are rolled out.. I would hope NBN would have known what they were expected to report on during the build and had a system that could provide that info; looking internally here I wouldn’t be surprised they got the “cheapest” system that met its primary functional objectives ;( It’s probably a manual process for some pleb like me running reports and joining things on excel and having them double checked etc before releasing them 

Well from what I’ve been told if the contracts are signed already for the work to go ahead then all these existing contracts will still be rolled out but no new ones made.
From what I’ve ready anyway, could be wrong?

Existing contracts under construction will be honoured.
HOWEVER the new Government will seek to vat those contracts, i.e depends how far the work has progressed in that particular fan, whether all the feeder fibers and nodes have been installed, more than likely continue. If only partially installed and still possible to convert to FTTN, then that is what will happen.
However that is where the fun will start, do they just trust Telsra’s cable pair and fault records and just install or do they determine FTTC cabinet location and test ALL pairs to subs premises and whether that is done after a long dry spell or after a period of rain .
Telstra has it’s legislated USO KPI’s, the local frontline managers theirs, they however are between a rock and a hard place. Faults have to be kept low and Telstra does not wish to spend money on local cables unless they have no choice.
A friend had a faulty pair – unuseable phone let alone broadband for SEVEN Months, The initial tech advised the fault was in the pit and reported that the pit require refurbishment, nothing happened, further reports and each tech that came out stated the fault was not in the Telstra network, but in the home.
Eventually after major complaints an ex Telstra Tech now contractor arrived, stated the cable pairs were bare as were others and rewired the pit. Now OK. Disgusted that the original correct report was never acted upon.
Telstra of course did the right thing and made reparation for 7 Months line rental for an unuseable POTS service – $20 off the next bill.
Like so many others she did not know she could have complained to the ACCC, so many others just give up and go mobile

I would say they don’t have a proper reporting system. Otherwise they wouldn’t have fallen so behind and not even notice. How do you pay a company $100M and they do basically nothing. I suggest they get some competent database analyst to build a proper reporting system making it easier for everyone.

I agree Scarytas, its just a bit of nitpicking like a spoilt child who cant get what they want and now.
By the way, i trust you are out of Fire danger down there? Fought some fires myself, scary stuff.

Well I don’t know about you plebs (*evil laugh* hah!), but I have a live report from my house – as I woke up this morning to the blissful sound of Silcar trucks in the street around me clearing ducts (with those high pressure water trucks?) and roping/dragging the yellow steel cables.

They are really getting moving here in regards to prepping for the green cables in my suburb, and lots of green stuff has been done already in previous suburbs so they must have been given some serious marching orders.

I drove past them on the way to work, and beeped the horn, giving them a mad thumbs up yelling “GO NBN” – bliss.

Well it may take NBN 3-4 months to get these figures, they are so useless they will have to have 3 meetings just over what colour to print the statistics in, then another 15 meetings on if they should split the 3 technologies, then another 3 meetings if they need to count the 31st or not, then maybe a few more on how to tweak the numbers so it looks like they are actually doing work.

Anyone else noticed that after each and every NBN detractor has come here and been, one by one, systematically disproved by the evidence at hand, as best we all know it, by a number of very knowledgable posters, these detractors now have absolutely nothing even remotely sensible left?

As examples of the scrapping of said barrel bottom, just today, one claimed the NBN is 3 years behind schedule? Another simply called NBN numbers fiction (and said nothing else)? And another made some strange remark about meetings/actually doing work etc?

Well I suppose it beats explaining to them for the umpteenth time how the NBN is funded (not by taxpayers), why FttP is superior/FttN inferior, wired and wireless being complementary, more competition Australia wide at the retail level, etc.

“I work for a Large Government Agency, and the systems we have are very difficult to provide meaningful statistics from”

Was this a system built in another age? For over a decade to cope with changing specifications, I progressively build and updated an application designed to process international student applications to study at Sydney University. Developing the queries and reports of the type needed to provide hourly information on the number of accepted offers was the easiest part of the application. Reports could be output to paper or Excel for further processing by the different people who needed this information for further analysis only if needed. SQL is simple but powerful.

As a new company, it beggars belief that NBNCo does not have a similar application to manage daily or weekly work assignments, except possibly to the extent some work is being done by sub contractors. Given the hardware tools have improved in the period I mention, the profit motive should be enough to ensure any contractor worth winning the contract would have tools to deliver most of the required information. This type of application will be needed for the duration of the build phase. It would be false economy to cut corners at this early stage. Given the nature of the project, NBNCo clearly relies on community support during its lifeblood. Consequently it has a major incentive to keep the information beast fed.

The problem is that once NBNCo contractors have done their installation as wholesaler, the householder then deals with retailers so sources of data fragment at that level.

As a new company, it beggars belief that NBNCo does not have a similar application to manage daily or weekly work assignments, except possibly to the extent some work is being done by sub contractors.

There’s your problem. NBNCo. DON’T do the work. Their sub contractors do which makes fragmentation a daily occurrence. It would take some considerable time to even get those subcontractors to reconcile that info, let alone present it in a useful format. Or do you expect all of them have highly efficient systems? Most of them have been around for 20 years or more.

I think you’re underestimating the sheer amount and different directions data is coming from.

” Given the hardware tools have improved in the period I mention, the profit motive should be enough to ensure any contractor worth winning the contract would have tools to deliver most of the required information.”

You have hit the nail on the head.

The contractors will have an agreed way of reporting included in their contract designed to give NBN Co the information they need for their reporting, when they need it. Any variation to the contract will cost.extra and that includes any additional reports.

NBN Co is not going to provide additional reports because of a media request or the request of a single parliamentarian to satisfy their desire to prove a point or their curiosity. Additional reports are going to cost them additional money and NBN Co has to be able to justify the benefits of spending the extra money.

Problem with this statement, is that whilst Mike Quigley will certainly be getting reports they will primarily be of estimates, and broad view indications of where the project is, I’d wager. High level data points.

The degree of fragmentation in reporting lines and data will be astronomical; virtually all deployment work is contracted. Telstra certainly sub-contract, and they hardly ever seem to be able to generate reliable reports of much of anything.

It’s one thing to be able to generate reports from data sources when they’re all in-house, an entirely different beast when there are many contracting companies working in parallel. Doesn’t really matter what year it is, in that respect; it’s unlikely to ever become a “button press” situation.

So all the notions that this is a five minute job, likely vastly undersell the effort that goes into existing reporting, and the management of all the systems used to track orders and activies.

I find it ironic that Turnbull demands the NBN be built for less, but seeks to burn funding in increased report generation. :)

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